Listening Skills in children with and without cochlear implants

描述（由申请人提供）：该计划的长期目标是全面了解儿童听觉信息处理的能力和局限性，听觉处理技能的发展，以及听力障碍，耳聋和使用人工耳蜗植入物如何影响发育过程。该项目目前的重点是儿童所使用的策略，以分离所需的听觉信号从干扰声音。迄今为止的结果表明，大多数年幼的儿童显示出显着的无能，以执行这种隔离在简单的检测任务，并在任务中需要注意的目标语音信息中存在的其他语音干扰。这些数据还揭示了源分离能力的巨大个体差异，一些青少年表现出儿童般的表现，一些年轻的学龄儿童表现出成人般的表现。成人与儿童的差异与研究结果基本一致。这项新的工作还解决了儿童和成人人工耳蜗植入所面临的特殊选择性注意力问题，并评估了增强选择性注意力的策略。听觉选择性注意在四种任务中被量化：1）简单信号检测，其中目标信号被随机多分量音调复合物掩蔽; 2）语音基频辨别任务; 3）语音识别任务，有和没有说话者的视觉表示; 4）空间分离任务，其中目标消息和干扰物在空间上分离。第一个任务的目的是量化一个简单的单参数模型的限制内的听觉选择性注意。第二个任务将产生一个说话者相似性的规模，然后将被用来预测说话者相似性的影响，在选择性注意任务。第三和第四个任务探索了增强选择性注意力的方法。该项目的总体重要性在于它对日常生活中常见的沟通情况的研究。在嘈杂的环境中进行言语交流对于正在发展言语和语言的儿童来说是一个特别重要的问题，这个项目的结果将增加关于儿童和成人如何解决这个问题的重要新知识。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long term goal of this program is a complete understanding of the capabilities and limitations of auditory information processing in children, the development of auditory processing skills, and how that developmental course may be affected by hearing impairment, deafness, and the use of a cochlear mplant. The current focus of the project is on the strategies used by children to segregate desired auditory signals from interfering sounds. Results to date suggest that most young children display a remarkable nability to perform this segregation in simple detection tasks and in tasks requiring attention to a target speech message in the presence of other speech distracters. The data also reveal large individual differences in source segregation ability, with some teenagers demonstrating child-like performance, and some young school-aged children demonstrating adult-like performance. The adult-child differences are argely consistent with what iresults. The new work also addresses the special selective attention problems faced by children and adults with cochlear implants and evaluates strategies by which selective attention can be enhanced. Auditory selective attention is quantified in four kinds of tasks: 1) simple signal detection, in which the target signal is masked by random multicomponent tonal complexes; 2) a speech fundamental frequency discrimination task; 3) speech recognition tasks, both with and without a visual representation of the speaker; 4) spatial segregation tasks in which the target message and the distracter are spatially separated. The aim of the first task is to quantify auditory selective attention within the constraints of a simple one-parameter model. The second task will produce a scale of talker similarity which will then be used to predict the impact of talker similarity in the selective attention tasks. The third and fourth tasks explore means by which selective attention can be enhanced, eithssessed. The overall importance of this project lies in its study of communication situations common in everyday life. Speech communication in noisy environments is an especially important issue for children who are developing speech and language, and the results of this project will add important new knowledge about how children and adults are able to address this issue.